Quake Champions Free-To-Play Period Has Been Extended

Id Software's Quake Champions has been in Early Access on Steam since August 2017. The game has managed to carve out a decent enough niche of first-person shooter fans who have been craving some fast-paced arena deathmatch action. While the game has managed to move several hundred thousand copies on Steam, id Software recently decided to expand the potential market reach by going one step further with a free-to-play period. It turned out to be so popular that id is now expanding the free-to-play period.

The news was made available over on the Quake ChampionsSteam community thread, where id Software announced that during E3 there was a free-to-play period for Quake Champions, and that it was so popular that the period has been extended by an entire week, all the way until Monday, June 25th.

Initially, id Software and Bethesda made the announcement about the free period during Bethesda's E3 press conference last week. It was, apparently, well received by the fans, so id Software decided to extend the free-to-play period. Additionally, if you grab the game now you'll be able to keep playing even after the free-to-play period ends.

You can get in on the deal by heading to the Steam store page and simply clicking on the "Install Game" button there. In addition to the free period, there's also a discount on the Quake Champions Champions Pack, which regularly is available for $29.99, but you can get it for 34% off the normal price, for only $19.79, over the course of the next two days.

Additionally, you can grab the Quake Champions Champions Upgrade Pack for a discount as well, knocking down the initial $29.99 price point by 34% off ,down to only $19.79.

The game has seen a major boost in daily average users, according to the Steam Charts. Since the free-to-play period has gone into effect the game now averages around 10,000 users a day, and has peaked at 17,000 users.

This is very similar to when Turtle Rock Studios and 2K Games decided to make Evolve Stage 2 free-to-play for a while, which attracted a large amount of gamers to the title and boosted up the user engagement for a short period of time. Of course, after people played it for a bit they then lost interest and moved on elsewhere.

In the case of Quake Champions, we don't really know what sort of long-lasting effect the free-to-play period will have on the game, but it may help bolster interest in it for the interim.

The Early Access version contains 11 champions, four game modes, and eight different arenas. During development over the past year id Software has been adding new content to the game and expanding the game modes and features.

There's also a number of customization features available in the game, along with champion-specific abilities not unlike games such as Paladins or Overwatch.

Originally, Quake Champions was supposed to be released in early 2018, but development is still moving slowly for the game and it's likely that it won't release in full until late 2018 for PC.